Pete Cashmore Doesn’t Like TV, Says Naiveté is Good

Mashable – the technology website with a social media focus – is one hell of a success story. The site was launched by Pete Cashmore when he was only 19 years old, and today attracts almost 13 million unique visitors a month.

He tells Entrepreneur that he was initially attracted to the Internet because he was bed-ridden for a long period of time as a teenager, and blogging gave him a sense of productivity. And to think, some say people who blog from their beds are losers. Take that America!

Some other items we learned about Cashmore from the interview:

He doesn’t like TV, so he doesn’t own one. “If it doesn’t come through the Internet, it’s not really compelling to me.”

He listens to his employees. “You don’t get the best work from people if you’re guiding them versus them guiding themselves.”

He thinks a fresh approach is a good thing. “There’s an advantage to having a certain degree of naivete about the challenges and the way things were before, so you can build something in a completely different way.”

He’d have dinner with Albert Einstein, Bono and Richard Branson, if it was possible.